Critically Engaged Civic Learning: A Comprehensive Restructuring of Service-Learning Approaches

Surveying the Syllabus: What Syllabi Communicate About Service-Learning at Four-Year Institutions

“…Noteworthy is that 74% (n = 216) of the total documents used the term "service-learning." Although there has been discussion in the field about the use of a hyphen between "service" and "learning" (i.e., "service-learning") to represent a balance between the student learning and service outcomes of the pedagogy and practice (see, for instance, Sigmon, 1994, for a discussion on a typology of service and learning), scholars have critiqued the hierarchies imposed by labels of service-regardless of if the hyphen is used or not-and have called for shifts in naming the pedagogy (Cooks et al, 2004;Costa & Leong, 2013;Hernandez, 2018;Hicks Peterson, 2018;Santiago-Ortiz, 2019;Stoecker, 2016;Vincent et al, 2021). Despite this criticism, our analysis found that the term "service-learning" still predominates.…”

The transformative potential of university service-learning: a multi-level analysis

“…La novità del service-learning ha un forte potenziale trasformativo dell'impianto didattico, sia per l'irrompere dell'esperienza, che diviene fondante, ma anche per la necessità strutturale di processi e metodologie di riflessione e sistematizzazione (Serrelli, 2023). Nel service-learning è prescritto che la dimensione dell'apprendimento accademico sia chiaramente riconoscibile e collegata alle conoscenze e alle competenze che sono oggetto dell'attività curricolare (Furco & Billig, 2002;Pawlowski, 2018); tuttavia, varie ricerche dimostrano che per rendere davvero accademicamente rilevante l'apprendimento dall'esperienza è necessario ricercare pratiche di qualità, dispositivi cioè integrati nel service-learning, che consentano di coglierne e liberarne le potenzialità trasformative (Vincent, Moore, Lynch, Lefker, & Awkward, 2021). Non è banale individuare metodologie pertinenti per coprire tutte le fasi fondamentali (registrazione e comunicazione, monitoraggio e valutazione, sia durante sia a seguito dell'apprendimento e del servizio) mantenendo allo stesso tempo l'integrazione del processo didattico.…”

Confronting the Embedded Nature of Whiteness: Reflections on a Multi-Campus Project to Diversify the Professoriate

“…The field of community engagement is also moving through a transformative period in which scholars undertaking this work are explicitly challenging the primary presumptions behind traditional forms of scholarship: the researcher as expert and problem-solver based on an extractive approach to community knowledge and expertise, rather than a collaborator. Larger global conversations are also focusing on the need to move away from historically oppressive models of community engagement, like service learning, towards more equity-based frameworks, like critically engaged civic learning (Vincent et al, 2021).…”

“…The methodologies of community-engaged work, in particular, have troubling effects on BIPOC faculty in tenure and promotion processes. Specifically, community-engaged scholarship requires ensuring that a project is itself designed in collaboration with community partners and not overdetermined by the university, holding space for all stakeholders' voices throughout the collaborative research process (Vincent et al, 2021) and recognizing that the outputs of community-engaged scholarship may necessarily look different from the more "traditional" forms of dissemination for scholarship, such as journal articles or monographs (Sturm et al, 2011). Studies have shown that tenure and promotion evaluation processes typically view community-engaged work by "either (1) reward[ing] community engagement as service (counting little in promotion and tenure) or (2) do not specifically reward community engagement as either teaching, research and creative activity, or service" (Sturm et al, 2011, p. 10-11), and in turn they create disincentives for faculty to undertake community-engaged work (Saltmarsh et al, 2009;Ellison & Eatman, 2008).…”